Surviving Freedom: After the Gulag

295 Pages·2003·2.91 MB·English

by  Janusz Bardach Kathleen Gleeson

In praise of Surviving Freedom: After the Gulag
“Janusz Bardach takes his place—along with Primo Levi and Elie
Wiesel—as one of the great souls who bear witness to a tormented
twentieth century. Against the suffocating Stalinist regime, Bar-
dach’s memoir of a young man’s defense of his integrity, his coura-
geous pursuit of a medical education, and his quest for love and
friendship is an adventure story, a love story, and a story for all
generations. Expect to stay up all night reading it.”
—Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies
“Is it possible to say that a book about surviving both the Nazi holo-
caust and the Russian gulag is wonderful? It is, indeed, if the book
is the account of Janusz Bardach’s survival and describes the tri-
umph of the human spirit. . . . This is a must-read. Artfully written
(in collaboration with Kathleen Gleeson), it tells you in detail about
hell on earth. It will make all of your problems seem like the trifles
they probably are. It portrays an interior landscape driven by un-
shakable hope. It will restore your faith in the human soul.”
—Antonio R. Damasio, author of
Descartes’ Error andThe Feeling of What Happens
In praise of Man Is Wolf to Man, also by Janusz Bardach and Kathleen Gleeson
“Gripping but matter-of-fact memoir....More than many such
memoirs, this volume clearly manifests the constant struggle be-
tween maintaining one’s life and maintaining one’s humanity in
inhumane situations. A fascinating history...[and] worthy com-
panion to such accounts as Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag
Archipelagoand Natalya Ginsburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind.”
—starred review in Publishers Weekly
“One of the best accounts...of life in the gulag....To survive the
gulag you needed strength and luck, and Bardach had a good mea-
sure of both, but it is our good fortune that in doing so he has con-
tributed to our knowledge of the human condition.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“An exploration of life at the edge....Bardach’s meditations on
slavery tap into the wall of pain and insight that feeds songs of
freedom everywhere.”
—Paul Goldberg, New York Times Book Review
“This is an extraordinary book even in an age such as ours in which
published revelations about the totalitarian regimes of Hitlerian
Germany and Stalinist Russia are themselves not unusual....
Written in gripping and utterly engaging prose...[it] should be
read by anyone seeking to understand this very violent century.”
—History Book Club
“Riveting ...it is often hard to remember that this tale of the Siberia
of Siberias is no fictional adventure.”
—Stephen Chang, Spectator Magazine
“We survivors of the Hitler regime...must tell our stories for as
long as possible if a recurrence is to be avoided in the future. Bar-
dach’s book is surely an important contribution against for-
getting....This outstanding description of the past at the same
time represents hope for a better future.”
—Simon Wiesenthal
“An enthralling record of often dreadful experiences in what
Solzhenitsyn has called ‘the pole of cold and cruelty’ of Stalin’s
labor camp system: a saga of human endurance.”
—Robert Conquest, author of The Great Terror
and The Harvest of Sorrow
“An extraordinary story of human brutality, human kindness, and
human ability to survive under the most inhuman conditions
imaginable.”
—Richard Pipes, Professor of Russian History, Harvard University
“After several generations, Janusz Bardach has opened another win-
dow into the tragic world first explored by Arthur Koestler in Dark-
ness at Noon.This is a worthy and affirmative book.”
—James A. McPherson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author
of Elbow Room
Surviving
Freedom

Surviving
AFTER THE GULAG Freedom
JANUSZ BARDACH
AND
KATHLEEN GLEESON
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2003 by the estate of Janusz Bardach and by Kathleen
Gleeson
Title page photograph:Janusz Bardach in 1955 (from the
author’s collection).
Grateful acknowledgment is made for use of the quotation
from The Reawakeningby Primo Levi, published by and
reprinted with permission of Simon & Schuster; also titled
The Truceby Primo Levi, published by Bodley Head and
reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bardach, Janusz.
Surviving freedom : after the Gulag / Janusz Bardach and
Kathleen Gleeson.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-520-23735-8
1. Bardach, Janusz. 2. Jews, Polish—Soviet Union—
Biography. 3. Jews—Soviet Union—Biography.
4. Political prisoners—Soviet Union—Biography.
5. Plastic surgeons—Soviet Union—Biography.
I. Gleeson, Kathleen. II. Title.
ds135.r9 b275 2003
947.085'092—dc21
2002152219
Manufactured in the United States of America
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum re-
quirements ofansi/niso z39 0.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence
of Paper).
For Juliusz Bardach and Ewa Bardach
And to the memory of Elena Laneyeva Bardach

Janusz Bardach died of cancer in August 2002, before Surviving Free-
dom: After the Gulag was published. He was eighty-three. Although he
regretted that he wouldn’t see the book in print, it was more impor-
tant to him to have completed the project and moved on to the next—
we were writing a book of stories about his medical career at the time
of his death.
Working with Janusz for ten years, I never ceased to be in awe of
his strength and spirit. He was larger-than-life, a heroic figure whose
life and personality encompassed extremes. He was born into a well-
to-do family, then spent eight years living the impoverished life of a
prisoner and civilian in the Soviet Union. He knew the despair of loss
and atrocity and the pride of reaching world-renowned status in his
field. He had an enormous capacity for work and for play—he’d sit
hunched over his desk for eight hours a day writing the pages of this
book, and that same evening he’d host friends or visiting interna-
tional writers on his back porch with a bottle of Polish vodka. His en-
ergy was endless, and his love of life undiminished by loss and hard-
ship.
Janusz’s tenacious, joyful spirit lives on in those who knew him,
and I hope that anyone who meets him in his books will come away
feeling strengthened and inspired. It was a tremendous pleasure and
privilege to help Janusz document his extraordinary life.
kathleen gleeson